18 December, 2004
Pressrelease: Immediate
From: Ulrick Gaillard
Date: December 18, 2004
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. On December 16th, as BRA’s driver was returning at 6:00 p.m. the organization’s 4×4 motor vehicle to the parking lot of the apartment building where BRA Dominicana’s Executive Director, Maria Virtudes Berroa, lives with her family in Santo Domingo’s center city neighborhood, Ensanche Piantini, he was approached by an armed man demanding the vehicle. When he refused, the assailant opened fire.
The driver, who carried a gun legally, opened fire back to the assailant. Suddenly rounds of gun shots exploded inside the lot. The exchange continued for a while before the attacker fled the crime scene. According to Ms. Berroa who witnessed the incident from her second-floor apartment, a second man was waiting in a car outside the lot.
“We do not know the motives for the attack. We do not know where these men came from,” said Ulrick Gaillard, Executive Director of the Batey Relief Alliance (BRA). The men did not take the vehicle, and the driver was not harmed. The vehicle, however, is severely damaged by dozens of bullet holes. The police came rapidly and filed a report. “Thank God! no one was injured or died,” added Gaillard.
The Dominican Republic recently has become the Mecca for violent crimes. According to local newspapers, everyday more than ten persons in Santo Domingo alone die of gun shots resulting from robbery, murders, arguments, etc. “This is so unreal of what’s going on in our cities these days. No one feels safe anymore. Criminals are everywhere attacking. They are desperate and dangerous individuals. And as the holidays are arriving, the situation will get even worse,” said Ms. Berroa.
Gaillard himself barely escaped tragedy as he left the country just one day before the incident occured after a two-week long visit with the local BRA Dominicana.
The Batey Relief Alliance, through its sister organization BRA Dominicana and local member grass-roots groups, delivers humanitarian health assistance and critical medicines to thousands of poor marginalized families in the Dominican Republic’s bateyes, urban/rural slum and border zone communnities with Haiti.
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